Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.

American Trash

Like many people, I have a relative who sends frequent email forwards of various ill-thought-out, thinly-veiled right-wing propaganda pieces. Today’s dose came in the form of a photo screed against the piles of trash left by Mexican immigrants as they cross through the Arizona desert on their way into the U.S. Here’s the webified version of it.

Usually I just let these things go without responding, but today being Earth Day, I couldn’t help myself from hitting Cmd-Shift-R, even though I didn’t know most of the people on the cc: list:

Wow, that is truly sad – breaks my heart. Almost as bad as the mess left by “real americans” after a rock concert or sporting event. “About 400 city workers hauled almost 220 tons of trash left behind by the more than 1 million people who attended the concert…”

Even as bad as the local “gully” in many Appalachian regions where the locals dump their trash. Weird thing is, those rock concert go’ers and hillbillies actually have access to trash cans – they just choose not to use them. Must be really tough to try and escape from abject poverty into a hostile nation that used to welcome the tired, the poor, the weary… without access to a trash can. I wish immigrants were more like hippies and hikers (“Pack it in, pack it out!”) or at least would put all their trash in a pile or something.

I will say this though – it’s wonderful to see right-wingers starting to care about the environment! But when you think about it, a pile of trash like that is nothing compared to the Texas-sized gyre of plastic swirling around in the Pacific ocean that all of us have created. Or any of the other seven garbage wonders of the world.

Nothing compared to the environmental impact of a nation full of SUVs and corporations that won’t stop polluting unless there’s either a profit in it or the EPA forces them to. Would be interesting to see side-by-side pictures of patches of earth fouled by, say, a Dow Chemical factory and all Mexican immigrants to have passed into the U.S. in the past decade. Seems like Americans pointing a righteous finger at immigrants for polluting is a bit hypocritical, no?

Living here in the heart of Neo-Con Land (D/FW), one is struck by the schizophrenic relationship conservatives have with immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

We get nonsense propaganda like Scot pointed out, and yet this place would grind to a fsck-ing halt w/o immigrant labor. Not wanting to stereotype job-roles, but the spoiled Republicans around here would be the first to howl if they couldn’t get their yard landscaped, their construction projects completed, or if their favorite restaurant shutdown due to lack of kitchen & dining room staff.

What do these folks think ? That invisible faeries do the real work that keeps the world going while they’re asleep ?